Chinese Nationals Are Illegally Crossing SW Border in Record Numbers Amid Concerns About Spying

Migrants who crossed illegally into the US from Mexico head to a processing center in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) – U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it has encountered 4,366 Chinese nationals illegally crossing the Southwest border so far in Fiscal Year 2023, which began on October 1, 2022.

And while those 4,366 Chinese nationals account for just 0.42 percent of the 1,029,953 illegal border crossings so far in Fiscal Year 2023, they are of particular concern, given escalating U.S. tensions with China’s Communist government and concerns about Chinese spying.

In January 2021, the month Joe Biden took office, the number of CBP encounters with Chinese citizens at the Southwest border was only 13.

The chart below shows the mostly steady increase since then, with a more than a thousand Chinese nationals encountered in both January and February of this year.

(Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

“These folks are over here to spy on Americans and to report back to China,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told “Mornings With Maria” on Wednesday.

“As I stated many times, our research institutions, our colleges and universities have been completely infiltrated by the communist Chinese. This is just another attempt. These people aren’t coming over here to work in migrant labor, they’re not working in agriculture applications, they’re not going to be working in motels.

“These folks are over here to spy on Americans and to report back to China. And this White House, again, as I’ve stated, has been completely compromised by just denying that this is even going on.

“And the numbers of people that we found on our terrorist watch list, the liberals will say oh, the system’s working because we’re catching them. Well, hell no, the system’s not working because we don’t know how many we’re not catching.”

Burchett said he recently visited Del Rio, Texas, where overwhelmed Border Patrol agents are processing more than a thousand people on some days. “The processing center there alone is costing the taxpayers $16 million a month just to process these folks, and they’re going to be released into the — into America, and they’re not going to show back up for court. That’s ridiculous,” Burchett said.

“The whole thing is a scam. These people are anarchists that are running our country right now, Maria, and people need to wake up, because we are losing our country and we’ll do it and we’ll completely capitulate and we’ll have — and when we have an incident with Taiwan and they’re infiltrated within every aspect of our country, you’ll see riots, you’ll see a shutdown of our systems, and we’ve got to stop this.”

Fox News reports that many of the Chinese illegal border-crossers are being released in the U.S., as are thousands of people from other countries, because there is no room to house them in overrun border facilities.